You Broke the Looking Glass

Prologue - 3

"Hm. I assume that's why you asked if I had dyed mine then?" Professor Crewel reaches out his hand, kept safe from the elements by a red leather glove, and lightly curves his index finger around the round edge of where my mask ends across my face. "Since you've brought it up, I've been wondering much the same on your end. Ugh, look at how woefully unkempt and discolored this is... I dare you to say this is your virgin hair."

"It's not." He nods and lets go and I try to smooth out my head from his judgment.

"Thought so. I would have been quite irate if you'd said it was." The professor adjusts his output and goes to take another sweet puff of vanilla air. After his throat's cleared, he asks, "Are you wearing extensions? If so, you paid way too much for them. You ought to find a better groomer."

"They're not extensions, either. It's a wig. I only bought it for a small play I was in, but it glued itself to me when I came here."

The older man tucks away his vape, looking over all the while in mild fascination at my claims. "So you'd been cursed on your way into Twisted Wonderland. That's only natural, though. Traveling across worlds will inevitably have some effect on your body. You'd best bark for joy that your affliction wasn't anything worse."

Cursed? I wonder what he means by that. I address that by asking, "You think what happened to me was caused by a curse?"

"Surely. Fret not, little mutt; based on my limited reading into this very subject, I can assure you the chance that your curse will last you a lifetime is low," the professor assuages with a confident cross of his arms.

Now he's really got my attention. "Mind telling me what all you've learned, professor? Any info at this point might help the Headmage and I find a way back home."

The older man rolls his eyes, yet still graces me with a thought out reply. "Very well. I'll throw you a bone this once. I've actually read quite a few biographies of travelers that've come to our world before you. Numerous outlanders have undergone transformations, such as shrinking in size, or gaining magical properties that their bodies never expressed before coming here."

"Strange. It seems to mostly be physical stuff."

The professor nods and continues, "Correct. Among every book I'd read, my favorite is of a man who became a great beast. It's said he was so ghastly, so frightening to cross upon, that he was exiled into the uninhabitable mountains of the Shaftlands by the first townsfolk he'd stumbled into. By the time the man was found again, years had passed, and he could no longer speak. He'd become incapable of communicating with other humans, and so he was taken in my researchers who thought him a new species of bear. They had plans to sell him off to a sanctuary once they were through with him."

"Poor guy..." Mr. Crewel stops his recount as a pitiful sigh escapes me, and he turns his head down towards me while sporting a smirk.

"Must you pups always whinge prematurely? I haven't even finished my story."

I cross my arms and quiet down, urging him on. "Sorry, professor. Please continue?"

"Fine. The man underwent various experiments until his blood samples eventually came back as testing for human DNA. Once the researchers had put everything together, they entered him into a rehabilitation program and gradually helped him regain some of his humanity." Mr. Crewel rubs at his chin for a moment, appearing to recall what happens next in the story. He adds, "It took a year or so for him to learn to read, write, and speak again, and he decided to publish his tale in a memoir."

"Sounds like he got lucky with how everything turned out," I comment. "How long ago did this person live? Did he live happily ever after, or anything like that?"